Next of Kin (13 page)

Someone had lit a candle. It was one of those you see in Catholic countries, with an ornamental gold top to protect it against winds and bad weather.

Not that it was still alight now in this gale. The wind was making his jacket flap and chills run through his scalp. The candle stood by the gravestone, pushed into the earth on a spike. It made him angry.

Perhaps one of her girlfriends had done it, in which case it was harmless enough. But it could have been someone else. An old boyfriend. Or, if you were to be insanely suspicious, him. The killer. His name was Lars Emil Andersen. Perhaps he thought lighting a crappy candle he had bought for five kroner in Netto would give him absolution.

‘Lars Emil Andersen.'

He formed the name with his lips and broadcast it over the cemetery with a curse attached. Lars Emil Andersen. Nineteen years old and a drink-driver. In his father's Volvo. An MD's son, God protect us. From the exclusive Skåde Downs. Six months' prison and disqualification from driving for a year. They let him out after four months.

Ole knelt by the urn grave. He had fetched one of the green vases to put in the ground and filled it with water from the tap by the dustbin, next to which there were trowels and watering cans you could also borrow. He stared at the candle. It seemed to him there wasn't enough room for both that and his bunch of flowers. In fact it had been put exactly where he had been thinking the flowers should go.

He swooped down, grabbed the candle and hurled it across the lawn. Take that. That will teach them. This was his daughter lying here. His flesh and blood. No one else's.

‘You were Daddy's girl, weren't you?' he said aloud, knowing it sounded unwholesome, and illegal. That was how it was now. You weren't allowed to love your children and use the old expressions without incurring associations of incest and rape. Innocence had gone. With Nanna's death it had been shot to pieces.

‘I love you so much. I hope you know. I never managed to tell you.'

He spoke it to the winds. For all that he was a psychologist, he'd never been much good with words. When you come from West Jutland and your parents have descended from generations of fishermen, you are frugal with your expressions and emotions. It's in the blood, he thought. But with Nanna this rule had been revoked. She had been different, straightforward; she had a warmth that could melt everyone around her. A hug from Nanna and you walked around for the rest of the day with a smile on your face.

‘You're getting too fat, Dad. You'll have to some do abs exercises or Mum will go off you,' she'd teased.

Only Nanna could get away with saying that. Only Nanna could make him do that nonsense. He had rushed into town and bought a sports kit costing a packet and then he had sweated away, jogging and doing sit-ups. Maibritt had been out of her wits with worry and said he was going through ‘a difficult age'. But Nanna had understood. Nanna had praised him and encouraged him with a hug.

‘Five kilos! Well done, Dad. Watch out now, you'll have all the female patients throwing themselves at you.'

Her voice resounded in his head. He could see her standing there with a smile twinkling in her eyes, and his loss lacerated every organ of his body and sent a pain shooting though his chest. Death. All the textbooks in the world on grief counselling and self-knowledge wouldn't have been able to prepare him. Therapy sessions with other bereavement sufferers had not given him any special insight. How could you understand an irretrievable loss? How do you comprehend that what was half of yourself is no longer there? Phantom pains, he thought. That must be how it feels. A leg, an arm, a soul had been shattered and what remained lived on, although not really wanting to, or perhaps not even being able to.

How was it that he could wake up in the middle of the night hearing her laughter? How was it that one moment he could physically hold her in his embrace, perhaps to console her over the break-up of a relationship, and then the next she was gone? How was it that he could hear her calling from the living room, as though she had just dropped in to see how things were going—when, on closer inspection, she wasn't there because she no longer existed?

Didn't exist.

Ole got to his feet. It simply wasn't possible, he thought. Nanna couldn't be removed, as if from a mathematical formula. She couldn't be voided, as if the checkout lady in a supermarket had added in the price of a bottle of wine too many. Nanna existed. She might not be here right now, in material form. But she was in the air around him and in the oxygen he breathed. She was in the blackbird that sang from the roof every morning. She was in the sun's rays as they warmed his head. She was inside him. She personally operated the pump that made his heart beat.

But that wasn't enough. Nowhere near enough. He wanted more and he couldn't have it.

He brushed the soil off his trousers and went back to the car. It was only when he started the engine that the idea occurred to him. He tried to shoot it down, to forget it, but it kept hitting him over the head, and in the end he reversed out and drove around the harbour to take the coastal road towards Skåde.

The architect-designed houses lay side by side in the residential quarter, and the beech hedges were approximately as high as the owners' salaries, and that was saying something. He and Maibritt earned a reasonable sum between them; he certainly wasn't complaining. He knew that even if they could have afforded to keep a BMW and one of the new VW Bubbles as a runabout, they would have preferred to spend the money roughing it in exotic climes or on charity work in Africa. That was something they were agreed on. But best of all would have been to spend money on Nanna, their only child. On her education so that she wouldn't be paying off study loans for years, or perhaps on a little flat in town for her. Well, of course, Maibritt had announced that she wanted to employ a cleaner, and at first he had objected. And then he gave in. Why not? They both worked from home, and neither of them was crazy about housework exactly, so he went along with the idea, but that wasn't the same as a luxury car or a palace on one of the town's most expensive plots of land.

He looked at the houses and the shiny cars in the carports and thought about Lars Emil Andersen. There was something about all this affluence that offended him. Growing up with a silver spoon in their mouths didn't do children any good. It couldn't do them any good.

‘Spoilt brat.'

He hissed it between his front teeth as he drove up and down the narrow avenues named after forest animals. How idyllic. How bloody irritatingly middle-class.

Of course the young man lived at home. Must have been the darling of the family. He could do nothing wrong, and he had excuses stacked to the rafters for how he could do such a thing as killing Nanna. He had been off kilter. His girlfriend had just split up with him. He had been upset, angry, out of himself.

Number 5.

He stopped the car and sat looking through the kitchen window, but no one was at home. No cars in the double carport, no bikes or mopeds.

An uncontrollable anger writhed inside him. They could all sit there, the whole family, gathered round the rib steaks and the lobster tails, chatting and taking things easy as if nothing had happened. Intact. Like a bubble of bullet-proof glass.

He got out. It was so easy. There was a stone right in front of him, begging to be picked up.

He bent down and took it. The sound of splintering glass gave him a fleeting feeling of happiness as he heaved it through the kitchen window.

‘We have reason to believe that a new terror wave is on its way to Europe.'

Kurt Strøm from PET had a way of making even the most hair-raising of announcements sound as though he had just asked someone to pass him the cream. ‘For this reason it is essential that we all lay our cards on the table.'

Dicte met his eyes. Her nervousness was swallowed with a mouthful of the black coffee that Wagner and Jan Hansen had brought with them from the police canteen to the impromptu meeting.

‘You're talking about the raid last night?' she asked.

They had woken to the news that four young men with Muslim backgrounds had been arrested and were being held in custody in Greater Copenhagen after a night raid on their homes. All three had been charged in accordance with the new anti-terrorism laws and the country was in shock. The youths had grown up in Denmark.

Strøm nodded. ‘As I'm sure you've heard, a warehouse containing explosives and weapons belonging to two men who have been linked to the four youths has been found in Bosnia. At present we are investigating the possibility of further involvement.'

‘A mastermind,' Wagner chipped in. ‘Here or abroad?'

Strøm upturned his palms to indicate that anything was possible. The World Trade Centre, Bali, Madrid, London. They were all familiar with recent events.

‘Time will tell.' He looked at Dicte again. ‘But there is a chance that this case may be linked with your beheading.'

‘My beheading?' She involuntarily clutched her throat.

‘Just a manner of speaking,' Strøm said, smoothing ruffled feathers. ‘But we have to consider how best to tackle the question of your security. And how to get to the bottom of this case, naturally.'

‘Are there any specific grounds for believing that there is a link, or is it just that, generally speaking, there is a possibility?'

It was Wagner who asked. His voice was tentative. It was about the demarcation of their departments, Dicte guessed. Departments should complement and support each other. PET did not run investigations or have cases, but they carried out surveillance on extremists and other suspicious groups. However, there were political forces who wanted to give PET greater powers at the expense of the police, and in some pockets there had to be a kind of rivalry.

‘Let me put it like this. Glostrup Police is at this moment examining various computers that were seized,' Strøm said, somewhat mysteriously. ‘The moment anything turns up, we have to be ready.'

Wagner stifled a sigh. Hartvigsen stared longingly out of the window. The sun had appeared after days of solid rain. The Chief of Police, with a disregard for his personal health, poured himself a second cup of coffee from the flask.

They went on to discuss what had happened the night before and Glostrup's Chief of Police, who had held a typically frank press conference. After all, he had once been the Vice-Director of PET.

Politics, writ large, permeated the whole meeting. A new anti-terrorism plan had already met with substantial resistance and been criticised for potentially infringing human rights. The government wanted PET to have access to airline passenger lists without recourse to court orders. In the cases of suspects under surveillance, there had also been talk of the use of listening devices and the collection of information from other sources without their knowledge.

Dicte thought about what she had done after she handed over the first film. How much did PET know? How much did she want them to know? Could it really be true that she suddenly found herself as a suspect under surveillance?

She had been invited to the meeting with the clear implication that they expected her to turn up. She was part of all this now whether she liked it or not, and it made her feel like a traitor. She shouldn't be sitting here. She shouldn't be either a victim or a player. She should be what is so elegantly called ‘the fourth estate'. She should be the press, keeping the others in line and ensuring that rules were kept, power was not abused. Yet here she was, deeply involved, dragged down into a quagmire of politics, ethics and moral issues, with her movement unpleasantly confined, as though her jeans and jacket had shrunk a size in the wash.

‘I suggest we put a man at your disposal 24/7.'

She peered up as all sorts of associations began to whirl round. She wanted to say she had enough problems with the man who, theoretically at least, was already at her disposal 24/7. Very theoretically, as Bo had come home late and had not given much of an explanation.

‘No thanks, not necessary,' she said.

‘Perhaps you should let us decide what is necessary,' Strøm said. ‘Or is there a deeper reason for you not accepting our offer?'

She tried to look indignant. ‘What's that supposed to mean?'

Strøm's eyes didn't deviate. ‘It means what I say. Have you a reason for preferring to investigate this case on your own? Without our involvement? Because if you have, I beg you to reconsider. This isn't a game.'

Dicte looked across at Wagner who sat with both eyebrows raised, obviously waiting for an answer, like the others.

‘I don't understand,' she said with as much honesty as she was able to muster. ‘You have a go at me, but it's not me you should be flexing your bloody muscles at. What are you actually doing? You can't just sit on your arses and expect me to be the guiding star for the Three Wise Men.'

‘Three Wise Men …?' the Chief of Police asked.

‘The police, PET and the Ministry of Justice,' she explained. ‘I'm a journalist. I'm not a go-between and you won't find an answer via me.'

She was protesting too much, she could hear that. They had been through this. Arguments had been batted to and fro. Ultimately, it was a question of beliefs, and she found it difficult to believe anyone wanted to take her life.

‘Anyway, you don't shoot the messenger,' she added, to re-use her ex-husband's words. ‘If they have really chosen me, it would be the height of idiocy to kill me.'

She had run out of breath now and sat back, gasping for air. How much choice did she really have when it came down to it? Wasn't she under surveillance already? Wasn't her phone tapped and all the rest? What did they know about her visit to Morten in Odder? She could just tell them of course, but something held her back. She needed to know more, to have things explained a little better. She needed to be rid of her gut feeling that somebody she knew was involved. Before that happened, she couldn't begin to guide them anywhere.

A mobile phone rang in someone's jacket pocket. Both Strøm and the Chief of Police patted their suits and took out their mobiles. Strøm put his to his ear while the Chief of Police sat for a moment, looking at his in wonder, before putting it back.

Strøm listened for a few seconds, uttering monosyllables. When he rang off, he was several shades paler. ‘There's been a beheading somewhere in Britain. Same modus operandi as on Samsø. Same manifesto.'

‘When did it happen?' Wagner asked.

‘The police have only just found out via the press. The
Daily Mirror
. But a newspaper held up to the camera by the victim shows it could have happened at the same time as the killing on Samsø, or at least more or less.'

‘Shit!' exclaimed Dicte. ‘They're using Al Qaeda's methods.'

‘Perhaps they're using Al Qaeda's methods because they are Al Qaeda.'

She looked across at Wagner but he wouldn't meet her gaze.